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« Previous EntriesClassic blunder #1 – Let’s just try it and see what happens!
Saturday, January 28th, 2012There are a lot of popular assumptions people make in this profession that lead us to make classic blunders. These can be assumptions about the change process, assumptions about our colleagues, and assumptions about our patrons. We can go into developing a new service or technology with the best of intentions and fail spectacularly because [...]
“I need three peer reviewed articles” or the Freshman research paper
Thursday, October 27th, 2011For the past six and a half years, I have been teaching Freshman about peer-review and how to find peer-reviewed articles through the library (or Google Scholar). I’ve developed all sorts of activities in different disciplines to get students thinking about audience, writing style, and the format of the articles they find. And every year, [...]
Invisible goalposts, support and having a plan
Monday, October 17th, 2011This summer, I was engaged with quite a few projects (several of which I was in charge of), but was able to make time to focus on scholarship just about every Friday. Part of that, in my opinion, is this blog. This is how I engage with the profession, share my ideas, and have professional [...]
Becoming Zen in the face of criticism
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011It’s been extremely challenging to post here regularly (though I’m getting better about it!), not because of a lack of ideas, but because of a lack of down-time. Summer came late (like mid-July!) to Portland and we’re trying to make the most of it before the days of endless gray descend. I’m lucky that I [...]
Portlandia
Sunday, May 22nd, 2011Greetings from Portland, Oregon! I’ve been wanting to post about so many things in the past two months (especially just about everything Barbara Fister has been writing over at Library Babel Fish — gosh she is insightful!), but it’s been difficult to find the time. The learning curve at my new place of work has [...]
My new job (or why all of my Oregon Trail gaming as a child might finally come in handy)
Tuesday, February 1st, 2011I’m one of those people who has a hard time waiting for people’s birthday to give them presents. Whenever I try to surprise my husband with something, I always end up telling him about it early. I can keep other people’s secrets, but I’m terrible at keeping my own. So I’ve felt like the cork [...]
Transliteracy from the perspective of an information literacy advocate
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010A colleague of mine and I have been talking about transliteracy for some time and came to very similar conclusions as David Rothman did in his smart and respectful critique. I’d thought about writing about it myself for months but two things stopped me. The first was that I thought perhaps there was something I [...]
What do they really need?
Monday, December 13th, 2010I’m not sure if I’ve become more cynical or just more observant, but lately I feel like I’ve been seeing things through new eyes. We make so many assumptions in this profession, often based on the idea that we know what students need and want. Time and again, research has shown that we’re usually wrong. [...]
Inventory of info lit instruction/assessment: Your feedback needed
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010I mentioned in my most recent post that our VPAA (Vice President of Academic Affairs) recently gave me the green light to form an information literacy committee chaired by myself and made up of faculty representatives from each of the six academic Schools and a representative from Academic Computing. It took me a while to [...]
Management, upward mobility and sticking
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010I was really excited when I saw the title of In the Library With the Lead Pipe’s post “Rising through the Ranks: On Upward Mobility in Librarianship” from last month. They always provide a comprehensive and thoughtful treatment of the issues they choose to write about. And this is an issue I think about quite [...]
Inspiring stuff to read, Take 2
Tuesday, September 7th, 2010I was thinking about writing a post reflecting on recent posts about the myth of the graying of the profession (and the coming librarian shortage) and Peter Brantley’s post about involving young’uns in discussing the future of libraries, but Colleen Harris beat me to the punch. And because she really knows how to tell-it-like-it-is, I [...]
What’s the deal, JSTOR?
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010I’ve written some posts in the past about vendors that have done some pretty slimy things in the name of making a profit. At least that makes sense to me. That’s their model — they’re profit-driven. Then there’s JSTOR. JSTOR is not an EBSCO or an Elsevier. JSTOR is a non-profit. JSTOR is a “service [...]
Immersion reflections
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010Wow, what can I say about Immersion? First of all, you have to be there to really understand what a profound experience it is. My in-laws were visiting when I got back from Immersion and I found it very difficult to explain the experience. What I told them is that it was an intensive program [...]
Numbers vs. meaning
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010Forgive this less-than-well-thought-out post. I’ve been thinking a lot about assessment lately and the librarianly love of numbers in assessment, and I’m a troubled by the way that some academic libraries tend to measure how well they are supporting the academic mission of the institution. Librarians keep a lot of statistics and measure a lot [...]
Computers in Libraries Recap: Day 2
Thursday, April 15th, 2010Day 2 was just as full and wonderful as Day 1. I continued my mostly staying offline during the conference and I think it really helped me to keep focused on what was going on in front of me. While I do like Twitter in a lot of ways and think it’s great for conferences, [...]
Baby steps in promoting information literacy
Sunday, March 28th, 2010In the Fall, I wrote a post about my own thoughts on who should teach information literacy in academic libraries. In theory, I don’t care who teaches information literacy as long as it’s taught by someone (faculty member, librarian, etc.). In practice, I still struggle with this in my own mind, mainly because of how [...]
Who should teach library instruction?
Thursday, October 1st, 2009Don’t worry, Walt, I won’t apologize for being away and I won’t promise that I’m going to post more often (though I have a lot of ideas for posts, something has been preventing me from getting them out of my head and onto the screen). Wayne Bivens-Tatum recently wrote a very interesting post questioning who [...]
Didn’t know I needed to be a salesperson
Friday, April 10th, 2009Yes, I knew I’d have to teach people how to use email. And unjam printers. And help people use copiers. But I don’t think I ever understood in library school how important sales and marketing would be to the success of our profession. Within a month of starting work as the Distance Learning Librarian at [...]
Making progress on library instruction
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009Last April, I started in my new position as Head of Instructional Initiatives, though for the first four months, I was also still doing the job of Distance Learning Librarian. Since taking this on at the end of July as my only job, it’s been a wild ride. I took a lot of risks, tried [...]
Technology education and the “real world”
Monday, December 15th, 2008I just love that feeling of serendipity when I find that people are thinking about the same things I am at the same time. Karin Dalziel made an impassioned case for every librarian to learn how to program. Dorothea Salo responded to it and described how she thinks technology should be taught in library school. [...]
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